


Empty Crib

by i_want_you_to_make_me (moosecrofts)



Category: BioShock, BioShock Infinite
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 17:06:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1718123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moosecrofts/pseuds/i_want_you_to_make_me
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She never did figure out how to wash away her sins. But she doesn't believe there is a single god that would turn her away now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Crib

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the game! Don't read if you haven't finished!

There are a thousand different universes. There are a thousand different variables and the only constants are Booker, the lighthouse, and the city.

And Elizabeth knows that with all these choices and all these universes, she doesn't really have a choice in anything. She tries to become the bird when all she'll ever be is the cage.

So she tries to free the other Elizabeth's. There are a million universes where Elizabeth dies before she finds the key, before she becomes omnipresent. She feels their agony in her. She feels the betrayal sharp like a knife. She has every single emotion that has ever existed running through her all the time like she is a siphon for all the pain and joy she'll ever feel in every body in every universe. She is all of them at once.

So she yearns for the weak ones who die. The ones who never even get to kill Daisy Fitzroy, who never even become powerful. Those girls are the cage because they still believe themselves the bird.

She saves them, instead. She kills Booker without a second thought because he would die without her anyways. Elizabeth grabs her own hand and has her shut the girl's eyes as she leads her through the doors and then brings her to Paris.

She's bought an entire apartment building (In another universe, in another dimension, there are numerous bank robberies with money mysteriously disappearing from inside vaults without a trace.) and she's got them all settled into nice rooms that look nothing like her room in the tower. She has them on a schedule so that they don't make anyone suspicious and she let's them bring lovers home because in some universes she isn't aromantic and because the innocence in her was still capable of a love so pure like that.

They're so beautiful in their freedom. They think they've been saved but really they are just ignorant. Ignorance is the only thing that saves her. She tells them they would have died and that she can use tears in a different way and that's all her innocent self needs to believe Elizabeth whole-heartledly.

Elizabeth finds she doesn't have a taste for Paris. The sights get old fast and the people are rude. It's nothing compared to watching how happy Paris makes her before the life in her dies. Some of them don't even know Comstock is their "father". Some don't even know Booker at all. She loves them the most because it is just Elizabeth who is their savior. Booker never did anything for them at all. They never trusted him, never thought he was a father, never thought he could get them freedom.

So she let's them all go on a schedule like she's their mother. She kisses each one on the forehead as they go out the door. They hum and sing and dance in the streets and sometimes Elizabeth cries because of how unlike her that seems now. She's better suited to a gun and blood soaking her hands.

She never did figure out how to wash away her sins. But she doesn't believe there is a single god that would turn her away now. She is power and strength and her innocence has been stolen away from her by a man who she hated and loved in equal parts. The man she wanted as a father and the the man she could never accept as one. And this has made her rage and lighting. She is wise. She is cunning. She is absolutely heartless. She is death in a skirt and lipstick.

And those girls are still youthful. They bring Elizabeth sweets and talk to her like she's the most amazing thing in the world and it pains her because she can remember dancing on the pier in Battleship Bay so clearly she aches, but that girl is not her. That girl is someone who's already dead and buried.

The Luteces tell her how futile what she is doing is. They tell her that there are a million more universes where she dies and that what she is doing changes nothing in any timeline that is even slightly significant. She knows. She can feel them dying. Feel the hope still burning as their breath shudders out. She can hear Booker scream and scream because Booker knows, he always knows. He wraps his arms around her like he never got to before and somewhere those Elizabeths know too. Their last words always seem to be, "I forgive you."

Elizabeth doesn't. She revels in killing Booker in some universes. She blinks and finds she is filled with dragons. They buzz and hum and are so powerful in her small body. But she is not weak.

"Your sins will never be forgiven." She says detached and cold and without care as she slits his throat again and again and again.

But sometimes she blinks and she is so incredibly lonely in the vast space of infinity. He was the only friend she had, the only thing she could call hers. So sometimes she'll find Booker before he sells her and she'll just talk to him. Run into him on the street and just talk to him.

"Have we met before?" He always asks.

"No, no we haven't. Not in this life."

He laughs like it's funny.

He usually tries to sleep with her. She always runs her hand on the blade of her knife when it happens but then she always just declines and leaves.

Sometimes she cries though. Everything in her is dead and she feels nothing at all, but this is the one place she's weak. She'll see him and just cry. Sometimes they'll be in the middle of talking when the sobs hit her and her stomach twists in the most unbearable way. Millions of Elizabeth's are crying at the same time for a thousand different reasons and her pain is validated just by knowing that. Sometimes it makes her grab him and just tear, at his skin, at his hair. It makes her want to rip him open like he rips her open again and again. She is a wound that won't set right, she just keeps bleeding out in the open air.

The worst though is when she talks to him after he sells her. He's drunk and half crazy and he slits his own wrists with shards of beer bottles and throws up in the dirty bathroom sink. Elizabeth tries to feel bad and sometimes she can but usually, usually, she doesn't. He gave her up for poker chips and a fresh pack of beer. He will never be able to undo that, never be able to repay that.

But the best universes are the ones where he keeps her. And because he keeps her, the Luteces never meet him. Anna grows up with broad shoulders and becomes a school teacher or a doctor or an author or an artist and that Elizabeth that was never Elizabeth has dragons in her too. Anna always seems to understand the price she had to pay in a life she doesn't live because she always does so incredibly well and is always so determined. Elizabeth takes pride in the fact that Anna still never wants a romantic relationship.

So when Elizabeth dies, she knows there's another Elizabeth in another universe that will become omnipresent the second her breath leaves her for the last time. Knows that that Elizabeth will be just as much her as the Elizabeth that is dying now. Knows that she will still kiss all those small birds in Paris on the forehead as they sing for her. Knows that she will cry over Anna and over her loneliness and because she doesn't have a choice in her life anymore because she has to make every single choice at once. Elizabeth breathes out and doesn't breathe back in. She smiles. The circle will never be unbroken.

 

 


End file.
